![the deer hunter review the deer hunter review](https://static.metacritic.com/images/products/movies/6/3717a508ae32124f3da1688836e95955-250h.jpg)
like these two beautiful things pitted against each other in a competition. it is a meditation on the beauty of violence. it's meant to show war destroying livesĪnd johnny, the hunting scene is crucial to the film. The vietnamese in the film are total cunts, but so are the americans. it begins with a very familiar scene of a bunch of boys who just do normal shit like go to the bar, get drunk, act like fools etc and then they are sent to vietnam and everything is destroyed i think you've missed the point of the film revol. Then we get the end scene where they all gather round after Nick's funeral and sing some patriotic shit about America, a not so subtle suggestion that whilst the US might be fucked up and dysfunctional it's our fucked up and dysfunctional family. It was 3 hrs with very little development of anything, Nicky's experience could have been a lot more interesting but instead we get to see Michael return home and fuck about in some courtly love with Nicky's girlfriend. The Vietnamese themselves are of course not so subtly portrayed as brutal degraders of these good old small town American boys, whether it's the one dimensional Viet Cong (who are shown to blow up villagers locked in a bunker with a hand grenade, more a typically American activity) or the punters in the Saigon Russian Roulette rooms. The treatment of the Vietman war is all over the shop, sometimes approaching it from a wider perspective with shoots of refugees and the embassy cut with real news footage but then cutting straight to a very narrow personal narrative only loosely bound up in the political situation. I couldn't decide if the characters were so underdeveloped as a commentary/reflection on blue collar masculinity or because the film just fails, I suspect it might be a bit of both. I just wasted three fucking hours on this, I mean why the fuck is it soo massively rated, it's slow, dull and essentially patriotic apologist tripe.